Eight-month-old Wyatt Ward celebrated his first Easter Saturday morning at the Great Aiken Egg Hunt, but he seemed more interested in putting the colorful plastic eggs in his mouth than in his basket.
Wyatt was on of more than 3,000 children who flooded the football field at Aiken High's Hagood Stadium for the second, communitywide event sponsored by Cedar Creek Church. In addition to hunting eggs, children played carnival games with Easter themes, romped in a bouncy house and other inflatables and munched on popcorn, snow cones and cotton candy.
"I don't think he quite understands the concept of grab and then drop, but that's OK," Amanda Ward of Aiken, Wyatt's mom, said and then laughed.
Ward brought her two other children, Madison and James, to the egg hunt last year and wanted Wyatt to share in the fun.
"This year, it seems a lot bigger," she said. "It's a good turnout."
For the hunt, volunteers from Cedar Creek scattered eggs across the south end of the field and some in the visitor stands for the older children to find.
The children were grouped by age, from infant to fifth-grade, for four different hunts. So many children lined the area designated for infants to age 2 that volunteers had to expand the section to make room for them all. Minutes after the announcer said, "Go!," all that was left on the field was green grass, and Easter baskets were full to overflowing with blue, pink and yellow eggs.
Danny Wilson, the campus pastor at the Banks Mill campus, said the hunt is Cedar Creek Church's Easter gift to the community.
"It is just simply a way for our church to reach out into the community and let them know that we would love to have them at Cedar Creek," he said.
A native of Aiken, Larry Wood is a general assignment reporter.